


a tall, tall glass wall

by borage (haechansheaven)



Series: oikawa week 2020 [4]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Day 4: Admirers & love letters, Day 4: Love at first sight, Falling In Love, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Oikawa Tooru-centric, Oikawa Week 2020, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:20:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25370770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haechansheaven/pseuds/borage
Summary: In high school, Hajime calls Tooru a glass cannon; gestures at his knees, and then his ankles; holds Tooru’s hand delicately in his and presses a kiss to the inside of his wrist. These gestures are kind reminders that the human’s physical form cannot and will not last forever, though it can last for a long time with care and consideration. Tooru chases a goal he can taste on the tip of his tongue, though.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Series: oikawa week 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1832464
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31
Collections: Oikawa Week 2020





	a tall, tall glass wall

**Author's Note:**

> for oikawa week 2020, day 4: admirers & love letters/love at first sight
> 
> **notes** : very non-linear! all present tense, but varying from moments in middle school, high school, and brazil! i was a little generous with the concepts of "love at first sight" and love letters.

Tooru is thirteen when he gets his first pair of glasses. It doesn’t make all that much of a difference. The most it does is magnify everything far off in the distance. (His future isn’t any clearer, though, and that’s the farthest distance he wants to see.) They feel foreign on his face, and he refuses to wear them, squinting at the board from the back of the classroom.

Hajime tells him to stop being stubborn, that it’ll be fine, that he _needs_ to wear them, slapping him on the back before stomping off to his own classroom.

This is the first year they aren’t in the same class. Tooru feels like a fish out of water without Hajime. It isn’t that he _needs_ his best friend to survive, but it definitely makes things easier. This is his first step to becoming the Tooru Oikawa that people place on a pedestal. This is the first step to Hajime becoming a person who commands all the respect in a room, even when Tooru is in it.

They’re in a new school, on a new team, and Tooru thinks that they’re just getting started. There are a thousand and one things that Tooru wishes to accomplish before he graduates middle school, and a million more in high school. He lists them off to Hajime, half-asleep, on their walk to school on their first day, and Hajime looks at him, smiles, and says, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

Because that’s the thing. It’s Tooru and it’s Hajime, and it’s them, against the world, in all the sorts of ways best friends band together.

From his seat, the front board is blurry and Tooru blinks it away. He doesn’t know that this is a sort of omen; that the world being so blurry is a sign that he’s been seeing reality on the other side of a wall made of frosted glass. Pressing the pads of his fingers against the smooth surface, Tooru pushes and pushes and pushes, but makes no progress.

His mother is cleaning out his room on a Tuesday when she calls, leaving a voicemail. Tooru doesn’t listen to it for three days, so consumed by life and living it. It’s been years since he’s been home, and it’ll be even longer until that house is a place that he rests for more than one day. In the future, it will still be a place he can call his home, but never will it be a place he will spend forever.

Friday night, Tooru sits in front of his small television he bought on a whim, unlocks his phone, and begins the slow, tortuous process of parsing through every single notification he’s ignored for the past week. _It’s improper of you_ , his father warns. Tooru isn’t what to say other than, _I know_ , before continuing the pattern. He’ll work on it.

“ _I found a box under your bed_ ,” she says, her voice sounding tinny and cold and a bit like an echo through the receiver, “ _and I don’t know what’s in it, but I thought to ask you if it’s okay to go through it and decide whether I should toss it or not. Give me a call back, sweetie. We miss you. Nice game the other day!_ ”

It’s short and it’s sweet, and Tooru, for the life of him, can’t remember a box under his bed, or why it might be there. The box, and its contents, fall to the side. _I’ll call you_ , he texts her, _and we can go through it together_.

There are practices and scrimmages and exhibition matches between then and this moment, other phone calls and meetings and meals. By the time he calls his mother, he’s forgotten about a box, and he doesn’t even think about what could have been in it. Over a call that lasts hours and hours, his mother opens the box.

Tucked away, safely, folded immaculately, are letters. Immediately he knows.

“You can save those,” he says, all gentle, smoothing out the fabric of his shorts. “I’ll call Iwa and ask him if he’d like to have them or not.”

“Ah, but…”

_But_ , he knows his mother wants to say, _that isn’t you anymore. You two aren’t in love anymore_. Tooru wonders how to explain to his mother that he’ll always be in love with Hajime, no matter what. She knows him better, though, than he’ll ever know himself.

“Let me know,” his mother sounds kind and soft and he misses her terribly, more than ever, in that moment, “what to do with these. If I should send them to Hajime.”

“… Thanks, mom.”

Down the hall, Tooru can hear Hajime’s laugh. It’s a sound that he knows better than his own alarm clock. There’s probably something to be said of that. He wants to reach out and join Hajime. Without his glasses, though, everything is blurry, and Hajime has disappeared into the stairwell before Tooru knows where he’s going.

They’re fourteen, and the distance between them is both shrinking and growing by leaps and bounds. It’s scary, because Tooru can’t really figure out how they’re changing, or what any of it means. Hajime still tells him to wear his glasses and Tooru still refuses. They leave practice together, and sometimes they eat dinner at the other’s house. Nothing has changed, and yet…

_And yet_.

Five minutes after Hajime has disappeared, leaving behind only a trail of his laughter, Tooru realizes that he feels a little empty. When Tooru is fourteen, he starts to write letters to Hajime that he hopes to one day give him. Something in him thinks that this might help figure things out.

Something in him thinks that maybe he should’ve known these things all along.

Tooru’s thumb leaves a mark on the glass of his computer screen. It’s a fancy one, costing so much money that he wonders if it was worth the investment. The most he does with it is watch his own highlight reels, answer emails, and stare at the faces of people he loves through a screen. Technology has brought people closer together and yet so, so far away. There’s a detachment to it all.

Hajime is in front of him, but he _isn’t_ , and it makes Tooru feel restless. To be able to see Hajime’s face real time, though pixelated, makes him the pain of missing him all the more.

Their conversation is mediocre at best these days, both of them fostering an exhaustion that’s a little too much. Hajime teaches Tooru about proper nutrition while studying for an exam, and Tooru scrolls through the roster for the Schweiden Adlers. _A new member_ , they tout, Tobio’s face plastered across the homepage. There’s nothing about Shoyou, though Tooru thinks that he can’t be far behind.

They’re inseparable, after all. Just like him and Hajime were.

_Are_.

“Ah. Iwa. My mom found a box under my bed,” Tooru says, head resting on his palm. Hajime looks up from his textbook, confusion spread across his face. “I called her the other day to help her go through it. I’m kinda hurt that my parents are so eager to clear out my room.”

Barreling through the bullshit, Hajime breaks through the thick glass wall that Tooru has been watching him through for their entire life. “What was in it?”

“A bunch of letters I wrote you when we were younger.” Hajime’s grin grows as Tooru speaks. Honesty is no stranger to their antics, and Tooru wishes he could reach through the screen and pinch Hajime’s nose. One day, technology will _actually_ bring people closer. “I thought I had thrown them out, but… I guess they survived to see another day.” There’s a pause before he adds, “Do you want them?”

Hajime spends time turning the question over in his head, clicking the pen in his hand before he says, “Do _you_ want me to have them?”

“Yes,” Tooru answers, because it’s the truth. He wrote those letters for Hajime. Those words helped him realize that he fell in love with Hajime and were written the moment that he stopped. Even if he never really did. “They’re letters to you. For you. Uh, about you, too, I guess.”

_Just you_ , Tooru thinks.

“Then I’ll take them.” Taking a deep breath, Hajime nods. “I’ll take them and read them with consideration.”

At fourteen, Tooru began to write letters to Hajime, unraveling the thoughts that swarmed his mind and left him speechless. He still isn’t perfect at communicating with him, even if it doesn’t truly matter—not when Hajime already understands him. The letters are Tooru’s way of letting him know everything he already knew and maybe a few things that he didn’t.

“I’ll have them sent to you, then.”

In high school, Hajime calls Tooru a glass cannon; gestures at his knees, and then his ankles; holds Tooru’s hand delicately in his and presses a kiss to the inside of his wrist. These gestures are kind reminders that the human’s physical form cannot and will not last forever, though it can last for a long time with care and consideration. Tooru chases a goal he can taste on the tip of his tongue, though.

Hajime, without hesitation, follows him. Neatens the glasses that rest on the bridge of his nose and remind him that this is _their_ goal, these are _their_ dreams, and this isn’t just Tooru’s fight. His voice is muffled through meters and meters of glass that Tooru knocks on, asking, quietly, if Hajime can even hear him.

“Iwaizumi called you a glass canon?” Issei glances over at Hajime, who stands across the court, ball tucked between his body and his arm. His shoulders are already so broad, and Tooru thinks it’s the kind of back that he’d like to look at while climbing an impossible mountain. “You’re an all-rounder. I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Is it because you’re kinda useless without your glasses sometimes?” asks Takahiro, pinching his chin between two fingers.

“So mean!” Tooru whines.

Tooru wonders if Hajime is the only one who can see how shattered Tooru is without needing to be told. If he closes his eyes and traces his fingers in random patterns across his skin, Tooru will pain the seams where pieces of him are barely held together. They bloom like red spider lilies around his wrists and ankles.

Will he break first, or put himself back together?

Hajime smiles at him through the net, and Tooru figures that it doesn’t really matter in the end.

His shoulder aches and, as always, Hajime knows before Tooru says anything. He’s benched almost instantly, dragged to the trainer’s room, Hajime silent. Anger swirls around them, one much more bitter than the other. Hajime’s is like a tea steeped for too long while Tooru’s struggles to make itself known. Beneath all of it is relief. Tooru was waiting for him to notice.

It’s a few hours later that Tooru realizes that seeing Hajime from a distance, so clearly, makes his heart sing. This is what it’s like to fall in love, probably. From the court, Hajime waves his arms in greeting. _Get better soon_ , he mouths before turning back to the court.

If Hajime is the person that he falls in love with for the first time, Tooru doesn’t mind. He could write a hundred and one love letters confessing to him and they wouldn’t be enough to explain how much Hajime means to him.

That night, on the way home, Hajime tugs on his sleeve with a grin. “You’re finally wearing your glasses, huh?”

“I can see you on the court with these,” explains Tooru. There’s a moment of quiet between them that Tooru uses to examine Hajime’s face. They’re still young and there’s still a lot of growing to do. “I need to keep my eyes on the future ace, don’t I?”

Hajime slaps his back before laughing. “Yeah. I guess you do.”

They’ll never go to nationals. Tooru doesn’t know this yet, and he surely doesn’t know that it’ll take living abroad and loving a rival in an unfamiliar country to realize that it was the journey that taught him more than success ever could. Regardless, Hajime will, for the rest of his life, be _his_ ace.

The first time Tooru he sees Hajime, clearly, is when he falls in love.

“And while you keep your eyes on me,” Hajime says, voice sturdy, “I’ll keep my eyes on you.”

_I can see you_ , Hajime says. _I will see you_.

Tooru’s fingers trace over the glass wall and, for the first time, catch on a crack. Perhaps this will break before he does.


End file.
